Coming over all weepy

Something strange has happened to me of late. I have started crying at movies.

Tear-jerkers: It's a Wonderful Life… Casablanca… Aliens?!

Until about a year ago, the only film I had ever really cried at was King Kong when I was four years old. Oh, and the bit when The Snowman melts. I think I was in too much shock to shed a tear for poor Bambi's late mother.

Anyway, some time after that, my heart must have hardened and I became immune to such sentimental cinematic entrapment. Macaulay Culkin gets stung to death by bees in My Girl? Good riddance. Han Solo gets carbon frozen in The Empire Strikes Back? Leia was too good for him anyway. Atreyu's faithful horse Artex sinks irretrievably into the Swamp of Sadness in The Never Ending Story? He can get himself another ride.

As you can see, I was (or at least considered myself to be) made of pretty tough stuff. But not any more.

I first noticed the change while watching It's a Wonderful Life last summer (why I was watching it outside of the Christmas season I couldn't quite say). The end credits rolled and I suddenly found myself sobbing uncontrollably into the sofa. Since then, I've been getting increasingly choked up with every film I watch, and not always at stereotypical weepies.

Some examples that have left me pretending I've got something in my eye in the past few months include: Casablanca (no surprises there), Brief Encounter (nor there), In the Mood for Love, The Apartment, WALL-E, King of Kong (about a computer game), Waitress, Aliens (?!) and Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman (her husband was just so mean to her).

I have no idea what sparked this sudden surge of over-sentimentality. Perhaps it's the price I must pay for all my years of emotion-suppressing bravado. But now that the waterworks have been turned on, there seems to be no turning them off again. And things are starting to get a bit out of hand. Last week I found myself welling up at one of the pitches on Dragons' Den!

Is this something that happens to everybody as they get older, like hangovers?

And just how bad is it going to get? At this rate, I'll probably find myself gently weeping over episodes of Hollyoaks by the time I'm 30. Worse still, this would involve existing in some sort of nightmarish parallel universe in which I am actually watching Hollyoaks…